Caucasian Chalk Circle

Grusha in Caucasian Chalk Circle is the voice of Brecht. Comment

The unlikely hero and the heroine: Brecht and Grusha
“Terrible is the temptation to do good!” Grusha responds to the child’s plight and yields to temptation. Grusha’s words ring a bell: “Ah, what an age it is! When to speak of trees is almost crime. For it is a kind of silence against injustice. To Posterity: Bertolt Brecht [1898-1956].

Like Brecht, like Grusha: the circumstances have led then to become humane while others disown such virtues: they could hardly leave the human beings, no matter from where they come from, should he in need of a helping hand. Brecht reveals to the world the pathetic state of the suppressed to the extent that he would become a fugitive; Grusha saves a helpless infant left behind by the suppressor to the extent of becoming a refuge.

When Grusha is left with the Governor’s infant son in her arms in the chaos to follow, she is the one person on the stage who is oblivious to the danger this involves, though the cook tells her in no uncertain terms that she cannot afford to be her usual dim-witted, innocent soul at a time like this, when everybody, servants and masters alike, has to think of saving his own skin. Grusha is a ‘born sucker’ an Americanism Brecht favor, who stubbornly persists in seeing the infant Michael as a “human being” in need. [He looks at me! He is human!]

Even so, she resists the temptation to rescue him and sits with him through the night after she has seen his father’s head impaled on the city gate. Only in the morning, with a sigh of resignation, does she steal off with him like a thief into the dawn without uttering a word. The again as the singer makes it clear her deed wasn’t inspired by maternal feelings. It was none other than a humane response. To be humane in worst of times demands the courage to ignore your personal or class interest, courage to withstand the opposition.

Brecht’s philosophy of life is revealed through song and dialogue. He shows us the depth of depravity as well as the hights of virtue. He tells us how a helpless girl would sacrifice her future and risk her life to save an infant with great peril upon her. In this context, it is not surprising Brecht opted to voice his thoughts by way of the character of Grusha. While fleeing from the hounds of the new rulers Grusha tells Micheal: “It is not for us, son, to choose our ways.” Brecht too may have thought same while fleeing Germany with his family [Hanna born in 1923 & Barbara born in 1930] to Prague in 1933, following the burning of the Reichstag, the Parliament of Germany by the Nazis.

War and draft: First World War [1914-1918]
Brecht was almost expelled at the age of 18 for dissenting about being necessary to defend his country in time of war. In Caucasian Chalk Circle, Grusha complains that the wealthy “drag our men into their wars”. Simon’s memories of the war reinforce the complaint as he witnessed his brothers slain around him for the sake of the Duke. It is possible Brecht viewed that it would be folly for Germans to die for the sake of the dreams of emperor Kaiser Wilhem 11[1859-1941].
By nineteen, Brecht started doing clerical work for the war; his poor health prevented him from being sent to active duty in the battlefront.

Times and travails of Grusha
Brecht shows us a world where values have become insignificant and the human beings become faint of heart in the hard times.
An autocrat reigns; aristocrats revolt; beggers are found in gangs and hoards; petitioners galore; everybody black-market all the products; soldiers sell the horses; foul words are spat onto young and old; peasants feign being on deathbed to evade the draught; children imitate beheadings in their play; policemen find themselves helpless amidst the rascals; rascal judges are hanged; rascals are made judges; no one speak against the open bribes at the courts; At last, not least the justice is found by means of violence: the biological mother and the surrogate mother are asked to subject their own child to the violence by a maverick judge.

Travel and travails of Brecht: Second World War
He later kept on moving around the world to escape Nazi rule; from Prague to Vienna; from Vienna to Zurich; then settling down in on an island of Flyn in Denmark; in 1939 to Stockholm; when German forces march into Denmark in 1940, Brecht and his family moved to Finland; in 1941 he settles down in U. S. A. If Brecht was an enemy native to Nazis in 1933, then again in USA, in view of his Marxist ideas Brecht was considered an enemy alien. Like other German immigrants, he was given a registration number, restricted to an area within a five-mile radius of his home, and not allowed outside after dark. During this bleak time he wrote The Caucasian Chalk Circle, completed in the summer of 1944 as the war turned in the Allies’ favor.
Brecht’s stay in America ended abruptly ended in 1947, after he was forced to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Although not an official member of America’s communist party, Brecht left U. S. A. for Switzerland, the very next day. In 1949 Brecht finally returned to Germany.

The accidental advocate of Marxism
Bertolt Brecht was born in Augsburg, Bavaria, (about 80km north-west of Munich) to a conventionally-devout Protestant mother and a Catholic father. His father worked for a paper mill, becoming its managing director in 1914. Thanks to his mother’s influence, Brecht studied the Bible, which resulting in making in-roads on his writing throughout his life. From her, too came the dangerous image of the self-denying women that recurs in his drama. Brecht’s home life was comfortably middle class though he portrayed & defended the suppressed class at all times.

Brecht had been a Marxist before he started studying Marxism [under the supervision of Elisabeth Hauptmann] in 1926, following the production of “Man equals man”: his second major play “Drums in the Night” was completed a half a decade earlier, in the year 1919.
“When I read, Marx’s Capital”, a note by Brecht reveals, “I understood my plays” Marx was, it continues, “the only spectator for my plays I’d ever come across”.

Grusha echoes Brecht: Power corrupts
Brecht had no second thoughts on the power of power causing corruption. Grusha, by sheer silence implies her feelings when the judge Azdek speaks to her kindly. He asks Grusha whether she wouldn’t like Micheal to be rich. Grusha does not answer, but the Singer tells her thoughts on the ability of the wealth to corrupt. Grusha thinks to herself it is better for him to be poor than to mistreat the poor ‘hunger he will dread’ ‘Not those who go unfed’. He will not always have to be afraid of who is going to chop off his head, as was done to his father because of a power struggle or because he was unjust to others.